Hard disk drive in USB/firewire Enclosure

I'd like to erase all prejudice from your minds before you chuckle, thinking that I'm some naive user who hasn't searched Google. I'm pretty sure this is quite an odd case.

I have a new Maxtor 500GB ATA hard disk drive. I set the jumper Master, and put it into an Adaptec USB/Firewire Enclosure case (ACS-200 is product #). Then I plugged it into my computer via USB, and formatted it with an HP USB formatting tool to NFTS. Well, it wasn't long before I noticed that it was only 127GB capacity [yes, this is the prejudice part]. So, I traversed the net, and it seems that this is a common problem. I verified that I have SP 2 (Windows Media Center 2002). Well, then I noticed a Maxblast CD that came with my drive. I installed that, and it performed a registry hack to enable 48bit LBA addressing (basically: "lets you use drives over 137gb"). Then I used Maxblast to wipe and re-format the drive (all of this is still via USB enclosure). No matter what I did, even with Windows formatter and even Partition Magic, I could not get my computer to read the device as 500GB.

After a couple of hours, I took out my 250GB drive that I've always used for my computer (partitioned into 70GB and 160GB, if you care) and replaced it with my 500GB Maxtor drive. I booted from the Maxtor CD, and entered its DOS Drive Formatter. THEN it registered as 500GB. Great. So, I partitioned all of the space into about 5 NFTS partitions of 120GB or less. Then I swapped the HDD's again, putting my normal one back into my computer and the Maxtor one back into the Enclosure. I booted, plugged in the enclosure, and---

Nope! Windows is still telling me that the drive unformatted, and 127 gb large. Maxtor is too, as a matter of fact. It seems that it only works properly when it is inside of my computer. None of this makes sense; my motherboard obviously supports larger drives, because I have a 160gb partition on my regular drive, and also because Maxtor recognized and partitioned my drive when it was in the computer. It can't be a USB limitation, can it? I know of people who are using 300+ GB external HDDs. On top of that, my Adaptec case specifically states "Supports large capacity Hard drives! (greater than 137GB!)"

Bottom line: My Adaptec enclosure case, Intel motherboard, and Windows operating system all say they're compatible with >137GB disk drives, but one of them must be lying. What's going on here?

Thanks for reading my essay :3

 

What is the model of your motherboard and the bios date ???

 

I'm not sure; in what way would I find that information out?

 

Download everest home edition to found out link http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

 

Motherboard Name Intel La Crosse D865GLC
Motherboard ID 63-0100-000001-00101111-092603-iSPGDL_G$BF865001_BIOS DATE: 09/26/03 13:44:41 VER: 08.00.09


PS, I tried updating my BIOS, but I'm on XP Media Center 2002; the express BIOS update method doesn't work on Media Center, they say, and the iflash version requires a floppy drive, which I do not have. How the ****, then, am I expected to update my BIOS? I would like to, as it is 4 years old.